“Making it personal”: ideology, the arts, and shifting registers in health promotion

Abstract

In South Africa, health promotion related to HIV/AIDS has been characterised as a component of public health prevention. It has heavily utilised global health ideology to construct promotional messages that rely on neoliberal models of individual, responsible health citizenship. However, after nearly 30 years of public health messaging, there have been only minor shifts in the country's HIV prevalence rates; it has become apparent that there is disconnect between policy, programmes, and target audiences. Debates about where this disconnect occurs tend to focus on the role of problems in biomedical knowledge translation or with structural inequalities that lead to health inequity. As debates increase, artists involved in health have emerged to address an additional reason: audience interpellation. In this article, I interrogate relationships between health promotion ideology and processes of interpellation. I suggest that disconnect between the two has roots in the tone of programming, the ways sociality is constructed within health promotion, and the kind of subject which global prevention programmes seek to constitute. Using a case study, I illustrate how public health ideology is made actionable through arts practice. While conventional health promotion programmes address populations in a way that allows individuals to distance themselves, members of South Africa's arts sector have worked to integrate prevention and care in a way that bolsters interpellation through making messages personal. The case study presents one performance but is informed by my broader research with over 20 theatrical groups conducted during 18 months of fieldwork. Analysis of the production reveals that artists act as mediators between population-level public health messages and individuals through the embodied technologies of applied theatre. However, I argue that artists also create space for participants to reimagine configurations of care, responsibility, and intimacy within health practices. ARTICLE HISTORY

Health Promotion Practices and Michel Foucault: A Scoping Review

“…43 One study was developed on the African continent in South Africa. 44 All studies included employed the qualitative approach method.…”

“…The articles addressed the following HP practices: 13 addressed governmental and international organization HP policies and programs; 12,15,18,21 -24,26,30,32,33,37,39 8 addressed health education, medication adherence and change of habits carried out in individual appointments; 16,19,20,27,29,31,34,40 one addressed aging and physical activity 11 ; one addressed healthy eating and physical activity 36 ; 3 addressed health education campaigns for the prevention of infectious diseases with a behavioral approach 25,38,44 ; one addressed HP in the work environment 28 ; one addressed HP in the school space 43 ; one addressed traffic behavior and alcohol consumption while driving. 17…”

Artwork from military personnel, Veterans, and their family members

“…The arts can be used to communicate in a way that is sensitive to local cultural traditions and challenges and to cross the hierarchical divisions and tensions that can exist in health communication. Artists can act as mediators between public health professionals and members of the public and can support individuals in taking responsibility for their own health (230,231). Because many health communication programmes involving the arts are community based, they also build on existing social networks and social capital, providing a culture-centred rather than individual-centred approach (232).…”

Acting With Empathy: A Counseling and Applied Theatre Collaboration

“…Within health care settings, applied theatre can be used broadly to educate patients, providers, and the public through the sharing of stories, experiences, and perspectives (Ruthven, 2016). AI is typically used in standardized patient training, whereby actors portray various symptoms and clinical histories in a role play and improvisation to improve the communication and interviewing skills of medical students (Hoffmann-Longtin et al, 2018).…”